by J. L. Doty
It made an awful racket, her ears popped painfully, and at the rapid drop in pressure a dense fog suddenly condensed in the air around her. But the pressure stabilized at a tolerable level, and out in the access tube she heard the whining, screaming sound of a high-pressure leak. The pressure started to drop further, quickly, but not instantly. Good!
She tapped the keys on her console, instructing the computer to start feeding air into the pod. Critical hazard warning, the computer said. Terminal decompression in seventeen minutes and counting.
“Good,” she said aloud to no one, popped the buckles on her restraints and pushed out into the access tube.
No lights, except for the telltale on the hatch on the inner hull. That was good too.
Crawling in the dark she discovered by touch that the tube had buckled about halfway to the inner hull, and there she could feel a strong breeze, and the scream of the air leak was deafening. She crawled past it carefully, got to the inner hatch, checked the gauge there and almost cried aloud when she saw there was air pressure on the other side.
In the background she heard her computer issuing another warning, though the scream of the air leak drowned out the message. She overrode the safety interlocks, palmed the hatch release, and pushed. Nothing!
She realized the problem instantly. The hatch opened away from her, but the pressure on this side of the hatch was about half an atmosphere. She was pushing against a couple of tonnes of pressure. Somehow she had to equalize the pressure on both sides of the hatch.
She crawled quickly back into the pod, instructed the computer to run the pod pressure up as high as it could—with the leak it wouldn’t be able to get far, but it would try. Critical hazard warning, the computer said. Terminal decompression in three minutes and counting. This had better work, she realized.
She crawled back down the tube to the hatch on the inner hull. The pressure differential was less now, but still not enough. She pushed, strained desperately, cursed at the hatch.
She crawled back up the tube into the pod again, started tearing at the cushion on her seat, pulled it loose—it was made to be detached for maintenance. Critical hazard warning, the computer said. Terminal decompression in one minute and counting.
She crawled back into the tube to the leak, stopped there, and in the dark slid the cushion along the wall of the tube until it suddenly stuck in the hole, and the scream of the leak changed pitch.
Her ears popped, and at the far end of the tube she saw a thin sliver of light as the inner hatch cracked open spontaneously. She moved quickly, knowing once the pod reserves ran out the pressure would drop and the hatch would close again.
The hatch was wide open now, but just as she reached it her ears popped again, and the hatch started to close. She shouted, kicked at it with all her strength, forced it open and spilled out into her station, floating in zero-G toward a console, tumbling wildly head over heals. The hatch on the inner hull slammed shut with a thump as the pressure on the other side dropped. She slammed into the console, caught hold of it and hung onto it for several long seconds to catch her breath.
She spotted a big crease in the plating of the deck; a wrinkle actually. She held onto the console to keep from floating away and traced the crease with her eyes. It ran across the deck, up one bulkhead, back across the deck overhead, then down the other bulkhead. Just before they’d lost power Cinesstar’s internal gravity must have given out in that section of the ship. One side of the crease had been subjected to a lot of acceleration, while on the other side Cinesstar’s internal fields had compensated the gravity nicely. Even if the effect had lasted for just a moment, she was probably alive only because her pod had compensated the fields around her. She’d heard about unlucky crewmembers who’d—
Her stomach suddenly climbed up into her throat. There was a big mess strapped in a couch at a far console—from where she stood she could make out the chevrons on one sleeve, realized the mess was what remained of Syda. She vomited all over the console in front of her, and in zero-G the contents of her stomach floated about and started sticking to everything.
Poor Syda! She didn’t want to go any closer—but she decided then she was going to make someone pay for this. They’d been double-crossed, betrayed by their own side, and someone was going to pay.
But the first step was to see what was left of Cinesstar. There had to be other gunners in her station who were still alive, and maybe she could help rescue them. And then somewhere someone had to be organizing the crew. Somewhere, someone.
York ran down the corridors of the ship, cut through walls and ran out into space. But this time there were no big people running madly about with him, screaming at everyone and everything, tearing at themselves, crying and sobbing, pleading for mercy. He was lost and alone and there was no place to go, and he just knew he was going to spend forever searching for a way home.
“York.”
He jumped at the sound of his name, turned, found one of the big people towering over him. One of her arms was missing at the shoulder, one leg at the hip, a big, ugly gash in the side of her head. She floated in front of him, and he cringed away from her.
“Don’t be afraid,” she said. “It’s me—Maggie. I won’t hurt you.”
He did recognize her, but he didn’t know from where.
“Come,” she said. “Let’s talk. It’s not as bad as it looks. And I think I can help you. But you can’t be twelve years old anymore.” She held out her hand. “Come with me.”
Alsa Yan snapped awake, peered blindly into the darkness, curled her fingers reassuringly around the grip of the small gun, hugged a girder tightly to keep from floating away in zero gravity. Something had awakened her, probably one of those fucking marines trying to get at him again. She waited, tried not to hold her breath, tried not to make any noise by breathing either. The marines were better at this than her.
There he was—or maybe she—a shadow, moving slowly and carefully across sickbay. Alsa waited in her shadow, waited until the other shadow was within arm’s reach, then reached out carefully with the gun and pressed the muzzle softly against the back of the shadow’s head. “It didn’t work,” she said. “You can’t have him.”
The shadow spoke in a woman’s voice, “We promised him. We gotta keep that promise.”
Alsa didn’t see it coming—a big, meaty hand grabbed her by the back of the neck, and another deflected the gun upward. She squeezed the trigger anyway, the small grav gun kicked and a slug pinged off the deck. She struggled, but there were marines all over her, most of them a lot bigger than her, and a lot better at this kind of thing than her. They didn’t even hurt her.
Someone flicked on the lights—Palevi. “You can’t have him,” she said. “He’s still alive.”
Palevi shook his head. “Is he really alive, or are you just guessing?”
“Statistically the odds are—”
“Fuck statistics,” Palevi growled. “I made him a promise.”
“You bloodthirsty son-of-a-bitch!”
The muscles in Palevi’s jaw tightened. “We ain’t animals, ma’am. We could have taken you a long time ago, but you were a friend of his and we know he wouldn’t want you hurt. So we did it the hard way, without hurting no one.”
“But you’re going to hurt him.”
Palevi flinched, and she realized how hard this was for him. “No, ma’am. I ain’t gonna hurt him. You’ve got him sealed up in one of them tanks, and I promised him I wouldn’t ever let that happen. I’m just going to let him die clean like he wanted.”
“Does he have to die at all?” a new voice interjected. The empress floated into the room and the marines backed away from her, gave her a clear path, probably the only person in the universe to whom they would pay such deference. “If there’s a chance he’s still alive, then he’s the only person who can get us out of this.”
Palevi shook his head. “I ain’t leaving him in the tanks.”
“I’m not suggesting you do.” The empress loo
ked at Alsa. “I’m suggesting the good doctor here bring him out of the tanks, bring him back to us as a healthy and whole leader.”
Alsa shook her head violently. “I can’t. He’s a mess. You don’t realize how bad it is. And with the facilities I have here he might not survive. Regrowth might not take; he’s had so much of it lately. Speed-healing might not work; he’s had a lot of that too.”
The empress nodded calmly. “I understand. But the fact remains that if you don’t, then these marines will most certainly see to it that he dies. And even if they didn’t force your hand, he’s the only man who has any chance of getting us back to a place where you would have the proper facilities.”
Alsa closed her eyes and buried her face in her hands. She had no choice. “Fuck!”
York slammed awake, sat up in bed, ignored the sideways tug of the gravity field of his cabin deck as it interfered with that of his grav bunk. He hesitated for just an instant, wondering how he’d gotten back to his cabin, wondering why everything seemed so normal. Then he tore frantically at his shirt until he could see his bare chest. The skin there was pink and healthy.
He threw back the covers, found to his great relief that his right leg was still whole, with no indication it had ever been missing. He wiggled the toes, they felt fine.
It had all been a dream, he realized, an insane dream . . .
. . . Alsa looked sadly at her handiwork. All that remained of York was a bit of tissue, a piece of bone, a smear of blood.
The technician held out the open body bag. “I’ll scrape him into it.”
Alsa looked at what was left of York, shook her head. “That’s not him. There’s nothing left of him.” She reached out, scraped the bits of tissue into a pan, turned toward the disposal can . . .”
York slammed awake, sat up in his bunk, struggled for long seconds while mentally he flipped back and forth between the two realities: it was a dream. No it wasn’t . . . yes it was . . . no it wasn’t . . . This time he wasn’t going to be fooled. Not by any of them. It was real, the body bag dream was a dream, but this was real. He started crying with relief. It wasn’t a dream. He wasn’t insane. No, he was insane, but that was all right, as long as it was real . . .
York could see that Alsa was tired. She could barely hold herself up as she described all the miraculous work she’d done to him: regrowing his eardrums, one artificial lung—the list went on and on. When she finished York just said, “Thanks, Alsa. Go get some sleep.”
Alsa stood to leave, but York stopped her with an afterthought. “Tell Olin and Anda and Maggie I want to see them.”
Alsa nodded tiredly. “Rame’s in sickbay, hardly better off than you, certainly no better at being a patient, been running damage control from sickbay. Gant’s all right; I’ll tell her . . .” Alsa hesitated, then blurted out, “Maggie’s dead.”
York closed his eyes. “Who else?”
Alsa spoke mechanically. “Paris, Straegga, the Dubye woman, a lot of others.”
“What about d’Hart, and Cassandra, and that servant of the empress?”
“They’re okay.”
York nodded. “Tell my officers meeting in my office in half an hour.”
Alsa shook her head. “Your office is under vacuum, along with the bridge and most of officer’s country.”
York said. “Then tell them we’ll meet in the marine CO’s office. I’ll use that as a command post until further notice.”
Cinesstar was a mess. While York was in the tanks, and then under the knife, his officers had organized damage control teams, cataloged and analyzed the extent of the damage, even begun repairs. They showed him vids of the interior and exterior of the ship. Apparently, his special little computer program hadn’t been able to put them into transition all by itself. It had tried several times, come close, would have failed, except for the last try when, apparently, right in the middle of diverting all of Cinesstar’s power into a transition attempt, she took a direct hit from a large warhead—estimated yield strength two hundred megatonnes. It should have disintegrated Cinesstar, but it turned out to be just the extra kick needed to blow her into up-transition. Cinesstar left the destructive force of the warhead behind, though before doing so she’d had a big piece of her bow blown away, and even more melted.
They weren’t in transition long, traveled only a short distance across the Sarasan system before Cinesstar shut down completely and spontaneously down-transited. What remained of Third Fleet—hurt badly at Aagerbanne, then further by Cinesstar and the feddie hunter-killer—withdrew from the system some hours later.
Rame finished the briefing with, “We’re close enough to monitor Sarasan’s transmitter splash, and apparently no one knows we’re here. They’re not completely sure we were destroyed, but they think we were. Highest probability kind of thing.”
They were meeting in the wardroom used for marine briefings. “What about that feddie hunter-killer?” York asked.
“That’s real curious,” Gant said. “I reviewed the scan log of the battle—that feddie could have burned us easily, but she didn’t. She kept taking on more difficult targets, actually helped us quite a bit, though I doubt she meant to. In the end she took a big one herself, went out with all hands.”
Cinesstar’s computer systems were a mess, but actually quite repairable. Almost every unit had sustained some radiation damage, but by scavenging circuitry from some units, they could make others operable. Without access to more spare parts they’d be operating below the margins necessary for combat, but Cinesstar wasn’t going into combat anytime soon.
“My crew?” York asked. Clearly Alsa was functioning on chemicals to stay conscious.
“Thirty-two percent dead. Almost all of the survivors injured in some way, half seriously.”
“I need all survivors functional, even if they are wounded. Do what you can.”
Alsa just nodded.
“Structural integrity?”
Temerek answered. “We lost about thirty meters off the bow, but what’s left is in fairly good shape, structurally. Of course we’ve been hulled in . . .” He consulted his terminal, “. . . twenty-seven places, and half the ship’s under vacuum, but we can patch most of that. With only two exceptions, which we’re fixing now, we’re structurally sound. She won’t fall apart under drive.”
“Drones?”
“That’s the good news. Since we didn’t launch them we didn’t lose any. Some minor damage here and there, but we should have them all active in a matter of hours.”
“Good,” York said. He looked at Gant. “As soon as we’re done here launch those that are functional on passive. I want you to start monitoring everything around us—this system, the interstellar space around it, the works.”
She nodded.
“Weapons and shields?”
Jakobee was now in charge of fire control. “We’ve got about thirty percent of our ordinance reserves left. Turret one went with the bow, and of course we’ve got no shielding there so we’re vulnerable to frontal attack. Turret seven’s a wash; we’re scavenging it for parts. Varying amounts of damage to turrets three, four, and eight, all of it repairable. The aft launch room is undamaged and fully operational, though we don’t have enough power to put a warhead into transition. Defensively we’re in good shape; ninety percent effectiveness there.”
York nodded. They were all looking at him for answers, but all he could give them was a knowing look and an authoritative nod. They needed to think he knew what he was doing. “What if we had the facilities of a small navy yard?”
Jakobee frowned, answered carefully as if the question were purely a hypothetical one. “Well, sir, we could probably mount some moderately effective shielding on the bow, certainly repair turret seven, all depending on the size of the yard and its facilities.”
York looked at Cappik. “Power? Drive?”
“Transition drive’s shot . . .” He raised an eyebrow, reluctantly playing along with York’s fantasy. “. . . though with the facilities o
f a decent repair yard we could fix ‘er. Sublight drive took some damage, but not so much we can’t repair her here on our own. Power plant’s the problem. Port chamber’s a total loss, hardly even good for spares. Starboard’s no worse off than she was before, which ain’t saying much. And Centerline’s nonfunctional, though repairable with access to a yard.”
Cappik leaned forward. “Starboard’s all we got, Captain. She’ll put out enough power for sublight drive, but we’ll be limited to about a thousand gravities. And no way in hell we’ll make transition. Certainly no power for combat: no shields—except a little for small debris deflection. And of course no real weapons; we won’t be throwing anything at anyone with our transition batteries.”
Cappik let that hang, basically a death sentence. But there was a chance, a faint chance, even if the rest of them didn’t see it. All he had to do was discard all his values, betray every quality he held dear, abandon his sense of honor, his code of justice, his convictions, his principles, his ethics. And then he had to convince them to do the same.
York looked them over carefully, asked, “If I got us access to the Sarasan Navy Yard, could you make this ship transition worthy, combat worthy?”
For the first time they realized he was serious, and Cappik spoke cautiously. “I’m not familiar with the facilities at Sarasan, but she’s only a subsector base, so I’ll guess we can do something with Centerline, maybe get enough out of her to make transition, with the help of Starboard.” He shook his head. “We need a full sized yard to really repair Starboard, and Port needs to be replaced. Probably all we can do with Sarasan’s facilities is patch them enough to get out of here.”
